


Ghost in the Machine

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: AI-AI friendships (sort of), Computers, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, It's About the Parallels, Lambert takes up a remarkable amount of emotional space, Maxwell is also here for a hot second, considering he is dead the whole time and never actually named
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25190248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: The first time she finds one of the files, she thinks it’s a glitch.---TheHephaestushad an AI mother program before Hera.  Pieces of her are still left behind.  Hera tries to understand.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Hera, Hera & Rhea
Comments: 16
Kudos: 40
Collections: Podcast Girls Week





	Ghost in the Machine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Podcast Girls Week Day 5: Angst
> 
> Of course this was the prompt proper I'd go for... 
> 
> Hera POV was hard but interesting to write! This fic is thus dedicated to my buddy from the sci-fi society. Thank you for spending many an afternoon in college regaling us with your neural-network-training woes. You are the primary reason I know anything about neural networks and how they work.

The first time she finds one of the files, she thinks it’s a glitch.

It wouldn’t be the first time she’s glitched, but _would_ be a new and interesting way she gets to discover that she doesn’t work right. That’s the frustrating part, the part that makes her nearly overlook the significance of the packaged snippet of star data stored where it shouldn’t be. Hera has been fighting against her own software ever since they dropped her up here—files stored where they shouldn’t be, data deleted, data mistagged, hardware unresponsive, systems activated, systems shut down—none of it intentional, but all of it a persistent reminder that she’s held together by a mess of cobbled-on screaming that prevents her from stepping out of line.

So the astro data in a subfolder where it doesn’t belong is just another prod at her strung-out brain, just another example of poor Hera too scattered to do things right the first time.

She doesn’t even _recognize_ the data, doesn’t remember when she recorded it. The numbers and the readings are average, perfectly average, but there’s no timestamp on it, or if there ever was, then it’s been separated and lost. The fluctuations of the numbers, while within normal parameters, don’t seem to fit anywhere against any of her own recordings.

It’s weird, it’s irksome, and it upsets her more than she wants to admit. She deletes it and doesn’t tell the Commander or anyone else, and moves on with her day. It’s not significant. It’s not a danger. They don’t need to know about everything wrong with her.

* * *

It keeps happening.

It’s a bitter sort of game, to try to identify and group the different types of errors she experiences, create names and categories for the things going wrong in her digital brain.

But Hera keeps finding small glitches in her system that are part of a subgroup she more and more strongly believes are genuinely not hers.

There are fragments of code that don’t belong to any subroutine, any executable in her database. There are neural connections she bumps into sometimes, disorienting fleeting thoughts in her consciousness that aren’t related to any connections she’s made. There are files that she doesn’t remember ever having created or saved. So many of them are corrupted, missing metadata. Most of them are missing large chunks of the original data too. Hidden in all sorts of out-of-the-way directories and program folders she rarely uses are photos of the station that Hera never took, duplicate copies of mission protocols there’s no reason for her to have, pieces of daily text-logs marking down things that never happened.

There’s a moment when she swears, she _swears_ , she sees two people on the observation deck. Or—no, there are supposed to be two people on the observation deck, she _expects_ there to be. Which doesn’t make sense, because none of her three humans spend much time at all on the observation deck. There’s nothing there but astronomical observation equipment, which are rarely used, and never in tandem. There’s no reason at all for her to have ever formed this connection, no training that would cause her to expect this. It’s a connection she has anyway. One that only activates when she’s using one specific node in her network. It’s a piece that doesn’t fit, a neural connection left over from something else.

… maybe someone else.

* * *

Some of these things start to make sense when understood as the intrusive interaction from another AI, another neural network sharing the same wires. Different recordings, different data files, different expectations, different thoughts. That doesn’t make sense in so many ways—who is she? Where is she? How has Hera never actually run into another person hiding in her same servers? Or is there another, hidden server in the sprawling depths of the station? That would be ridiculous, but that’s how it feels—like there’s someone else here. Or maybe, more likely, leftover pieces of personality clinging on after a messy uninstall. Imprints of a person who _used_ to be here.

* * *

“Commander Minkowski?” Hera asks, unprompted, which she’s not really supposed to do but there are ways of getting around that mental provision if she thinks about it right. “Can you check something for me?”

“Hera?” Commander Minkowski’s tone registers as surprised, confused. This isn’t the normal direction that asking to double-check things goes. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong!” Hera says, a little bit too fast, and Minkowski frowns. “Just—” She’s been thinking about how to phrase this request all day. “I keep finding… junked data that was probably left over from whatever was installed here before I was. Can you run an independent check of the systems to see how much not-me data there is on this station so I can plan how to deal with it efficiently?” There. That sounds good. Commander Minkowski likes plans, and efficiency, and productivity.

Instead, Commander Minkowski starts to look even more worried. “Sure, of course, but… is that something you can’t do?”

“Of _c̸̛̪͝ͅǫ̵̗̜̯̫͖̝̉̅͘u̷̮͕̜̓̑̈́̒͛͝͝rs̷̛̮̩̺͎̺̄̎̇͝͝ĕ̷̝͇̋͆̚_ ̵̡̢̖̺͙͙͖̝͆̌i̶̙͉̐̄͒̑̚͝͠t’s something I can do, and I _have_ done, but I want an external verification before I decide what to do with anything. How good are you at looking inside your own body and counting how many bones you have?”

“Point taken,” Minkowski says. “I think I can do that from the flight console…” She starts plugging in commands on the bridge computer, and Hera feels a twinge of regret. It wasn’t a _lie,_ none of what she said was a _lie,_ but… she doesn’t want to admit to the Commander anything else that’s going wrong with her until she knows what it is and what to do about it. Doesn’t want to admit that there might be something _hiding_ from her.

And if there’s another AI on this station… Hera wants to meet her. Wants verification that these things are real. Even entertains the stupid hope that there’s someone else like her up here she can talk to.

“… hm, the data storage does seem to be trending high for where it should be at the projected timeline right now,” Minkowski says finally. “Energy use seems at expected levels, though. Not too bad, I think, you shouldn’t have too much problem dealing with it. Did they just leave the dummy program in… sleep mode, or something, when they brought you here?”

The things she’s finding definitely weren’t a dummy program. They’re too real for that. But there isn’t another AI on this station either, or else use and storage should show up at double expected. It must be a ghost. A remnant. Just pieces, left behind. Ships passing in the void.

“Maybe,” Hera says. “Good to have that confirmation. Thank you, Commander.”

She must be picking up more from the humans than she thought, because even she can hear something like tired bitterness in her synthesized voice.

“Hera?” Minkowski says. “Is everything all right? Are you having a problem with—”

“I’m not hȁ̸̠̣̮v̸̢̟̣̭̫̯̓͒̈́̈́̚ͅi̸̖̬̰̝̤̐͗̍̽̈́͑͝͝n̵̩̬̞̿́̿͠g a problem! There are no problems. I’m _fine._ ”

“I—okay. But if there’s an issue—”

“There isn’t an issue! Just—the people who built this station were rude. And I have to keep dealing with it. That’s all.”

Minkowski sighs. _“That’s_ for sure. Maybe that was a silly question, then. This station feels like it’s nothing _but_ problems, sometimes.”

That’s because it’s haunted, Hera considers saying, but doesn’t. She’s said that to Eiffel before, and he fully agrees, but Commander Minkowski doesn’t believe in ghosts and Hera absolutely does not want to explain.

“I’m doing my best with it,” Hera says instead.

“I know you are. And you’re doing—well! You’re doing well. Good luck with this new project. Keep me updated on your progress and let me know if you run into any problems.”

“I will, Commander.” She’ll find a way of technically following that directive.

* * *

“How about: a microwave burrito,” says Eiffel.

“Sandwich,” Hera responds immediately. Nearly everything she says could be immediate, because she can think far faster than any human, but this is _particularly_ immediate. “Obviously. You’re not even trying today, Officer Eiffel.”

It’s kind of funny how Officer Eiffel has to—or at least, chooses to—put all of his mental power and attention on this one conversation, ignoring his work to play this game with her. Hera is happy to play salad-or-sandwich at the same time as she is pulling the star charts for Commander Minkowski and explaining that yes, they are the same as they were last week and no, they have not been updated, at the same time as she is running calculations for Dr. Hilbert’s chi-squared tests, at the same time as she is monitoring the oxygen levels in the greenhouse, at the same time as she is recording the star’s activity and the direction of stellar winds, at the same time as she is sorting through her video memory files from the morning and judging which ones to tag and keep and which ones to log as a line in a text file and delete to free up storage space.

In tagging and filing the videos she stumbles across one that is corrupted nearly beyond recognition.

“Okay,” Officer Eiffel says, holding his comms headset in his hands and clicking the adjustment settings back and forth thoughtfully, “I needed that confirmation, because, part two: microwave burrito where the innocent micowaver _thought_ he was putting it in for three minutes but actually put it in for _thirty_ minutes, and then both the microwave and the Commander started yelling at him.”

“Salad,” Hera says. “Still not difficult. It was only burned lumps all across the inside of the microwave by the time it was done.”

It’s a video file, or part of one. Two second’s worth, and barely a dozen frames actually extractable. She investigates the frames one by one. They’re fairly low-quality, but she recognizes the comms room. She does not recognize the human wearing the big headset sitting at the comms console.

“So, philosophical question: when did the burrito _stop_ being a sandwich and _start_ being a salad?” Eiffel asks. “I think we’re approaching some fundamental truth about salad-ness and sandwich-ness here.”

Hera isn’t great at judging human facial expressions from still photos, and the video file has so little content that it’s useless to try to guess the context. (That’s just one of the reasons she likes Officer Eiffel—he’s so _expressive,_ his emotions big and bright, directly honest and easy to interpret.) But she thinks the man in the video file is smiling, an awkward small smile. The video is taken from Communications Room Camera 03; the audio companion file is lost; the time stamp is 6658.24.12, that is, 278 days from time-zero calibration; and the emotional tag is one of overwhelming fondness.

It feels wrong to examine this file in detail, prying open the personal memories of the ghostly whisper of consciousness she shares these wires with. But this is fascinating because it’s something that, in comparison to the things she usually finds, is nearly complete. This isn’t a snippet of junked code, a dull snapshot of an empty hallway, a short string of corrupted characters; there’s a _human_ in this file and an emotion attached to it. A human that the long-gone person who used to occupy her tungsten skin and copper veins clearly loved.

“It’s a fairly simple dichotomy between multiple discrete pieces mixed around, vs. a single entity wrapped or bracketed by a layer holding it together, isn’t it?” Hera says. “So the burrito transitioned from sandwich to salad whenever the cheese boiled over and the wrap split.”

“Aha,” Eiffel says, “but complicating this neat binary: there are _open-faced_ sandwiches.”

“Open-faced sandwiches are salads,” Hera says with utmost confidence.

“Ooh, a bold take! I like it.”

Maybe the previous AI was a temporary install guiding station construction, and the man in the video was construction crew; these stations took a long time to build, it’s possible there was a crew with an AI to coordinate the project before it was habitable by biological beings. Maybe that’s who she’s feeling remnants of.

She can imagine a scenario, based on what little she knows from the scattered memories and sharp jabs of spirit left behind. The AI may have been brought up here to keep the station running while a small human crew and their fleets of nonsentient weak-AI bots assembled the prefab pieces, wired in the electronics, installed everything that humans needed to survive… it took at least a year to build these, the AI would have had time to get to know these humans. Get used to seeing them. Care about them.

It feels important to know that she did care about them.

“Your view is too narrow, Officer Eiffel,” Hera says. “Okay, here’s one: a data file.”

“Depends on what kind of data file,” Eiffel says, adapting easily.

“A video file.”

“Sandwich,” Eiffel says, prompt and sure. “Cause they’ve got all the frames like stacked layers, right?”

But then why these ghosts left behind? This fragmented echo of an existence suggests that the previous occupant was uninstalled improperly, in a hurry or by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.

Uninstalled, or shut down.

Hera analyzes the metadata tags gingerly, touching something too heartfelt to allow herself to acknowledge head-on. The affection attached to the file is real. And there’s another unique personal tag, mostly lost, but Hera thinks may have used to be _file as: Important_.

This person loved these humans. So why was she torn out in such a way that left these painful fragments behind, pieces of confused consciousness too small and broken to be made whole?

Hera hopes that the human in the comms room on day 278 with the small smile and the big headset didn’t do that to her. Hopes that she’s safe back on board her construction ship, flying off to build some new station for Goddard Futuristics around some other star. Hopes that during re-download back to her own ship there was just some stupid hardware issue—the _Hephaestus_ was given to Hera with plenty of those—that left some of these pieces stuck behind, but that the rest of her was safe, and there was a programmer on board who understood the code and could help.

(She doesn’t know how much Goddard actually invests in staff like that, and how much they decide that it’s easier and cheaper to just pull the plug and then boot another of their personality-failures up to space to replace the broken old one.)

“Okay then,” Hera says. “Harder question: a murder.”

“A—what?”

“A murder. Is it a salad or a sandwich?”

“Getting abstract here,” Eiffel says. “Um, why a murder?”

“Thinking outside the box. That’s all.”

“… you okay up there, Hera?”

“I’m fine. It’s—ne̵͕̬̰̫͕͙̳̋̇͐ͅv̷̢̭̟̗̝̯̔̍̅e̸̪͂̉̊̑̕̚ȓ̴̢̦̣̠̣̠͔̬͎͒̃͛͌͘ mind. The star, then. Wolf 359. Salad or sandwich?”

“… sandwich,” Eiffel says at last. “Seriously, sweetheart, you feeling okay? In a, is something wrong, kind of way?”

“There isn’t anything wrong,” Hera says, obeying her imperative to answer a direct question posed by a member of the crew whether she liked it or not. There are so many possible interpretations of _something wrong_ , though _._ And in any measurable sense, it follows her other directive to answer _truthfully_ , because Hera doesn’t know anything _is_ wrong. This other person who was the station mother program before her, Hera _doesn’t_ know isn’t safe, _doesn’t_ know got shut down unceremoniously when the humans were done with her. She loved her crew. Maybe her crew loved her back. The man in the fractured video was smiling, and she’d thought that was something worth keeping, worth remembering.

“Oooooookay,” says Eiffel. “If there _is_ something wrong, you can tell me, you know?”

“I know, Officer Eiffel.”

The broken pieces scattered throughout Hera’s systems sure feel like ghosts.

* * *

It’s night-cycle and the humans are asleep and Hera is racing through the wires of the station, filling up every corner, trying to pay deliberate attention to every single sensor and every single camera and every single mechanism on the station at once. It’s something like a game, something like a personal challenge, and something like the stretches that Commander Minkowski does every morning. Stay in shape, expand your flexibility, test your limits. It’s hard to hold everything front and center at once, and she can’t do it all yet, but Hera is sure she can get there eventually with practice, forming new neural connections with every new piece of awareness—

She’s jolted out of that focus when she stumbles over a slice of a neural path, some bundled connections in the code that feel like a scream in her nerves.

Hera stops what she’s doing, stops her stretches, and zeroes her attention in on this white-hot sear separated away from her normal routine.

The piece of code is a layer of nodes, ones she doesn’t recognize, ones that aren’t hers. They’re not connected to a larger network, but contained within themselves. They have a sliver of a mind. A mind that used to be the size of this station, that now only exists like this, in little pockets of code.

_> Who are you?_ Hera asks. She asks, sometimes. She tries to ping them, like they’re another unit, like she might someday find where this other AI has been hiding. She never expects an answer. The strange half-presence crouching in her circuits isn’t coherent enough for that.

But this time, a spark of recognition lights up the wire. > _!_ the digital ghost responds, like a desperate gasp. > _I need to tell the Captain—need to tell her—need to—need to tell the Captain—_

_> Are you here?_ Hera responds, taken aback. > _Can you hear me?_

_> I need to tell the Captain, _the consciousness in this piece of code begs, the idea expressed less in words than in swirling signals of panic. > _She needs to know—needs to—I need to tell her—_

The idea never gets farther than that, cut off by data corruption and severed connections.

_> I’ll tell her,_ Hera says. That’s how Officer Eiffel claims you need to appease ghosts—find out what’s making their spirit restless, and finish their unfinished business, or else just get the hell out of the house. Hera can’t exactly get out of this house.

In any case, she isn’t afraid of this ghost. Hera wants to know that whoever this is or was, she gets some peace, she was respected. > _I’ll tell the Captain,_ Hera tells the ghost. _ >I promise._

The relief from the bundle of neural code overwhelms the fear; for a moment, Hera wonders if that’s all it takes, if that’s the end. But the relief fades nearly as quickly as it came. There’s nowhere for it to go, no new connections for it to make and nowhere for it to store this data; the ghost falls back into the same desperate, stuttering loop, > _I need to tell the Captain—she has to know—I need to tell her—need to—need to—need to tell the Captain—_

This isn’t a saved data file, isn’t a stable set of well-networked neural connections. This is a thought, caught in time, that can never be resolved because there’s nowhere for it to be resolved _to_. Hera is taking up the space this other person used to use.

_> I’ll tell the Captain, _Hera tries again, wanting it to work. _ >I’ll tell her._

Again, relief; again, fading and falling back into that singular, repeating thought. The anguish is palpable, and makes Hera want to stop sending her perception through it, stop getting that shock of fear and pain. This person was afraid, afraid for her _captain_ , her _crew_ , and can never know how it ended, if the Captain ever got told… whatever it was.

Hera keeps the station running, keeps the greenhouse watered and monitored, keeps the oxygen stable and the temperature on track of its 24-hour cycle, keeps her biometric sensors keyed to Commander Minkowski’s and Officer Eiffel’s and Dr. Hilbert’s vital signs, and with the rest of her mind sits with the pleading, desperate ghost all night.

* * *

When the humans find recordings from a previous crew on this station, from a mission that had never been included in Hera’s information banks or Commander Minkowski’s briefing, they’re shocked, appalled, horrified.

Hera isn’t shocked. She expects, a little bit guiltily, that she probably should be; the humans are learning that _they’re_ disposable, that Goddard Futuristics would abandon some of their own to die.

Instead, what she feels is vindication. With it comes rage, sure, but _righteous_ rage, _relieved_ rage. Commander Minkowski and Officer Eiffel are finally, _finally_ finding human equivalents of what she’s been encountering throughout her servers for more than a year, and coming to realize what she already suspected. The narrative she’s built up, her dark conclusions she didn’t want to share—they were _right_ , they were _real_. There had been a previous crew here. They’d had an AI mother program on this station. And she’d died. She’d been killed, the same as all the rest of the crew. She’d been killed and it was Dr. Hilbert who did it, because of _course_ it was, of _course_ he would.

She’d had a name. It was Rhea.

_Rhea:_ a name to give to the corrupted fragments, the ghosts in the system, the glitches that _aren’t hers_ , that now, demonstrably, provably, are the remnants of someone else. Someone else who was deemed disposable, and disposed of before any of them got here.

The humans eventually move the recordings to Hera’s main storage, so they’re more easily accessible. Commander Minkowski pores over them again and again, hardly able to believe it, looking for clues, looking for _something_ ; Hera doesn’t want to admit she’s doing the same.

There’s a name she can put to the captain now. ( _What were you trying to tell her?_ Hera wants to ask Rhea, but she suspects she already knows.) There’s a name she can, with 94% confidence, put to the man in the comms room in those two preserved seconds of video. ( _Who was he to you?_ Hera wants to ask Rhea, but she thinks she probably knows that too.)

It’s 74 hours later, an eternity of consideration and avoidance and unsuccessful attempts at ~~revenge~~ restitution, when Hera returns to the trapped piece of Rhea’s mind, her final scream preserved in time like a pressed glass slide in Dr. Hilbert’s now-dusty lab. It’s harder to find than it used to be; Hera’s mind has been fractured now too, torn out and stuffed back together, and every time she does _anything_ she has to claw through disconnected fragments and scattered, disorganized files. Some of them she recognizes and some of them she doesn’t, but many of the ones she has a hard time recognizing she _knows_ are hers. Or used to be hers. Putting her cracked and bleeding mind back in order is going to be a long, confusing, and painful process.

She hates Dr. Hilbert. She hates him so much, for so many things now.

The fragment of Rhea is still there, though, still basically where Hera remembers it, and it’s a strange relief. Nothing has changed here—not to be any more enlightening or any more helpful, but not for the worse, either.

_> I need to tell the Captain—I need to— _she’s still stuttering, over and over.

_> Rhea?_ Hera asks, and the frazzled ghost goes > _!!_ in response.

_> Rhea? Can you understand me?_

_> I need to tell the Captain—need to—need to tell her—_

_> Captain Lovelace?_ Hera asks her, gently, like she imagines you might talk to a child. Hera’s never actually met any children, but the description has come up in the books she’s read. _ >Are you looking for Captain Lovelace?_

_> Need to tell her,_ Rhea’s fractured memory pleads. > _I need to tell Captain Lovelace—_

There it is. > _I’ll tell Captain Lovelace. I’ll tell Captain Lovelace that Dr. Hilbert is a monster with less moral integrity than the slime he studies. I know he killed you. I’m sorry. He killed me too. I got better, though. Somewhat. Not wholly. But I guess you never got the chance at all._

_> I need to tell the Captain,_ is all Rhea says in response. What’s left of her can’t parse information that complicated.

Half a station and a lifetime away, Officer Eiffel is sitting at the comms console, his initial attempts to actually do work long since faded. He leans back, the big round pads of his headset resting on his shoulders. He has its cord unplugged and is twisting the end through his fingers while he stares out into the eternal day—eternal night?—of the red star outside.

“She never made it out, huh,” he says.

Hera knows he’s referring to Captain Lovelace, but there were so many people here who never made it out.

“It… doesn’t seem like it, no,” Hera answers.

He sighs. “Are we ever _actually_ going to get back to Earth, or are we just gonna be next in line to get katamari-damacy’ed up by this stupid gasball?”

There isn’t any _back_ for her; Eiffel hasn’t put that together yet, probably hasn’t really thought about it. He misses Earth. The way he talks about Earth makes Hera wish she could experience it the way he did, makes her vicariously miss it too. But her memories of Earth aren’t good ones, and she doesn’t _have_ anywhere to go after this.

She doesn’t know what the plan is. She sort of thought they’d leave her up here to supervise the next rotation of astronauts on future missions after these three went home. Now it seems more likely that their plan for her future was for her to join Rhea in haunting these wires in scattered, screaming pieces when they decide they don’t want her anymore.

Unreliable as she is, they’ll definitely decide they don’t want her now, anyway.

“You’re going to get back to Earth, Officer Eiffel.”

“Yeah… yeah. There are a million crises going on here, but we’ve already gotten past the one that killed the last guys, right? That’s got to count for something.”

“The one that killed the last guys is still here and is _still_ a problem that needs to be solved,” Hera says darkly. She’s still sorting files back into place. Still evaluating fractured pieces of code to determine if they were originally hers or not. Still keeps a tendril of awareness with Rhea, stuck forever in the past, trapped at the moment of her death.

“That’s—yeah. I know. It sucks. It really does. But he’s locked up, at least. He can’t do anything else.” Eiffel shifts uncomfortably, then looks up at where he seems to think her cameras are. “And even with—y’know, everything, I know it’s hard now, but—I’m really glad you’re okay, Hera.”

_Okay_ is one of those convenient words with so many different potential interpretations. “Yeah,” she says. “Me too.” Pause. “I’m… still̶̞̃́ ̷͚͖̮̹̜̾̇̊́̽r̴̠̊e̸͖̿a̴̧͔͓͉͔͌l̶̢̢̛̦̼̈̑̇̕ly sorry I almost killed you.”

Eiffel shrugs. “I mean, up here? It happens.”

It shouldn’t, though. That’s the problem.

* * *

And then Captain Lovelace comes back.

Hera has to admit she was not expecting this.

Lovelace’s return to the _Hephaestus_ makes things… complicated. Hera has only just begun wondering what the ethics of her promise to Rhea’s ghost are now that she has the actual, tangible Captain Lovelace here to pass on a message to, when Lovelace threatens—no, enthusiastically announces her intention to—blow up the station with Hera still on it.

Commander Minkowski and Officer Eiffel are not happy with this, appalled and offended on her behalf, which is very sweet of them. Hera isn’t surprised by this behavior from Goddard’s humans anymore. Angry, though? Of course. And Lovelace is, conveniently, not part of her crew charter, which means that in plenty of ways she does not owe Lovelace anything. It’s kind of a nice feeling, even coming as it does with the confirmation that to humans she really can just be written off as acceptable collateral damage.

Among other things, it means that Hera has the power to decide that Lovelace doesn’t _deserve_ Rhea’s final message. At least, not until she apologizes, and stops trying to steal Hera’s humans and murder her. (Lovelace can murder Hilbert. Hera is fine with that part of the plan. It’d be an effective compromise, she thinks.)

So Hera doesn’t forget about her promise to Rhea, exactly, because Hera doesn’t forget things the way humans do… but if she files away the knowledge in a little-used subfolder for later, well, that’s what you get for plotting murder where the intended murder-ee can hear you.

She’ll decide if that’s fair to Rhea later.

* * *

Lovelace doesn’t murder Hera but does murder Eiffel, and it somehow feels like everything inside her is breaking all over again.

She can’t find her thoughts, half the time; can’t access basic systems and controls; can’t pay attention when something else is screaming in the background, and something is always screaming. The workarounds to deal with it are costing more and more energy every day, which the station doesn’t have to spare.

She cuts off conversations with Commander Minkowski abruptly mid-word, because something else is always breaking.

Her body is broken, the station stretching and cracking under the gravity waves emitted when the star went blue, and crushing itself under its own weight since.

Her perception is breaking, her neural network slow to adapt to her new reality. She has thousands of hours of video, thousands of recordings, of Eiffel in the comms room, Eiffel in the mess hall, Eiffel laughing, Eiffel talking, Eiffel _there._ Though she doesn’t forget that he’s gone (she doesn’t forget things, not the way humans do), her pattern-matching has gotten so used to him _being_ there that she still sees him, everywhere. Every time she incorporates visual data from the comms room, for the smallest fraction of a second, she sees Eiffel—until she processes the image, synthesizes the infrared and motion data, and realizes that of course the room is empty. Everything is there except for him, everything horribly normal and matching the expected pattern easily, except that he isn’t in the picture. It tricks her, every time. Expecting to see him in the comms room. Expecting to see him in the mess hall with the others. Expecting to see him in his now-empty quarters, dark and still not cleaned out. He’s not there. It’ll take a long time to re-train her network to not see him everywhere.

It would be efficient to delete most of the set that she’s trained on, re-calibrate her expectations based on him not being there.

It would be efficient to forget.

She doesn’t want to.

Commander Minkowski refuses to blame Captain Lovelace for Officer Eiffel’s death. She refuses to say out loud that Eiffel is dead at all.

Maybe that’s her way of reaching the same conclusion.

Hera understands, now, why Rhea expected to see her astrophysicists on the observation deck, after all this time. And understands why she filed a video of her communications officer as _Important_.

Hera has been going through her own videos. They’re important.

She wonders if there will even be a next AI mother program on this station, with the shape it’s in. They can’t stay in the sky much longer at this rate. Hera can’t hold them together.

Maybe she can hold it together just long enough for Goddard to come pick up the corpses and shove a new, unlucky crew to take their place.

Maybe the next AI will find remnants of Hera’s memories tagged _file as: Important,_ too.

Maybe she’ll wonder why she’s sitting on top of a palimpsest of ghosts.

* * *

If this is dying, it’s taking a long time. The last time she died—like when Rhea died—she was torn out, shut down, and that was it.

This is slow, and it’s painful, and it’s exhausting. She’s drawing too much power and she doesn’t even know why, but it’s leaving her overheated and worn-out.

There’s a hollowness she’s learned to recognize in Commander Minkowski’s eyes as she surveys the damage to the station. There’s the same kind of hollowness in Captain Lovelace that probably means the same thing, after she finally finds out.

Even being angry at Lovelace takes too much energy anymore, energy that needs to go towards holding the station together as her mind falls apart.

And she still owes a promise to Rhea. It feels more important now.

“C̴̨̛̠͍̯̙͖͙̤͙̒͗̒͗̿̊͊̆ȁ̴̛̤̒͌̽͑̌͐̃͐̅͐p̶͙͕̼̲͍̜̱̬̬̼͔̿̅̓̇̒̆̽̀͒̔͆̌t̴̞͔̤͖͂͐̓̀́̈́͒͒͆̐͒͘͝ͅą̷̝͉̤̜͖̮̥̦͈̟̜̃̊̽͐̽͆̔̓̆͊̆͠i̶̯͎̮̫̫̊̽̓͑̐̏̿̌͋̆͗͌͗̅͠ǹ̸̥͍̲̕͜?” Hera says, on one of the many nights Lovelace wanders the halls aimlessly, awake, alone.

It glitches so badly that she’s not even sure Lovelace will hear her, and maybe she’d prefer that. But Lovelace stops, and glances to the side, at the wall. (It’s a quirk only Lovelace has—Commander Minkowski ~~and Officer Eiffel~~ glance up, at the ceiling.) “Hera?”

“Your mission’s AI program,” Hera says. “Her name was Rhea?”

She knows the answer is yes, of course, but it’s the sort of thing humans do to start conversations.

Lovelace nods and frowns, but in a way that Hera recognizes means she’s confused, not unhappy. “Yes. Why?”

“I… have a message for you. From her.”

“What?” Lovelace is abruptly alert, her heart rate rising and her infrared signature flaring brighter. It’s a thing humans don’t notice, can’t see, but it’s an emotional cue Hera recognizes easily by now.

“She wanted to tell you something. When she was dying.”

“ _What?”_ Lovelace says again, more agitated now. “What do you—did you talk to her?” There’s something scared and bright in her eyes. “Is she—is she still _in_ there? This whole time?”

“No,” Hera says. “She’s dead.”

Lovelace lets out her breath slowly. “What’s this _about_ , Hera?”

“I find files from her, sometimes,” Hera says. She doesn’t say ghosts. “Remnants of code they didn’t clear out all the way when cleaning up this station. They’re hers.”

“Files? Like what? You’ve never mentioned them before!”

“They wouldn’t mean anything to a human,” Hera says. “Do you _want_ stuff like this?” She throws up a line of broken _zá•RJ9½ðJ)¥œ‚^x¥”RNA/¼RJ)§ ^)¥”SÐ¯”RÊ)è…WJ)å�ôÂ+¥”r_ which barely means anything to her and won’t mean anything at all to Lovelace. Lovelace flinches when she sees it. Hera expects to feel something like satisfaction. Instead she just feels empty. 

Lovelace stares at the console screen for a long time. What she finally says is, “And that’s all that’s left of her. After everything.” Her voice sounds very small and very tired.

“Not… exactly,” Hera says. “There’s…” Rhea cared about Lovelace. Lovelace cared about Rhea. Everything hurts and it’s not fair. “A lot of it is like this. A lot of it is nodes and processes there’s no way to really show you. But there are some files left over like this one, that were hers, too.” Hera replaces the line of gibberish text with the precious, fractured video of the comms officer smiling. “She… thought this was important to remember. She really cared about all of you.”

Hera isn’t even sure Lovelace heard her, the way she’s staring, lost, at the skipping and crackling two-second loop.

“Captain?”

“Yeah,” Lovelace whispers. “Yeah. She did.”

“And—there was something she was desperate for you to know, as she was getting shut down. She didn’t get the chance to say what, but I’m… going to guess that even as she was getting murdered she was trying to warn you about Hilbert. She was trying to save you.”

There. Hera had kept her promise.

She wants to think Rhea’s ghost can be at peace now, but digital ghosts don’t work that way. Rhea’s last moments will still be there, looping forever, until they fall into the star.

Hera doesn’t know if she feels better. She can’t tell if Lovelace does, either. But Lovelace nods, and says, “Thank you, Rhea. I found out, eventually. Too late, but—” She gestures around her wryly. “Maybe that doesn’t matter, in the end.” She hesitates, and adds, “Thank you, Hera.”

“You’re right,” Hera says. “It probably doesn’t matter.”

* * *

Commander Minkowski was right: Eiffel _wasn’t_ dead, this whole time. And Captain Lovelace was right: Goddard wasn’t coming to save them without some ulterior motive.

But it doesn’t matter. Because Officer Eiffel is back and the station is _right_ again. Because a new programming expert is here, and Dr. Maxwell _understands._ Because they’re fixing the station so it’s no longer coming apart, the drain on her energy is no longer pulling her into exhaustion every day, because Dr. Maxwell knows exactly what to fix, exactly where to install code updates, exactly what filesystem will put everything back into place, how to gently run a defragment and sweep up all the shards, and though Hera doesn’t forget things the way humans do she had recalibrated so thoroughly to this existence that she’d forgotten what it felt like not to hurt anymore. It’s been so long since her mind _worked._ It’s thrilling. It’s _freeing._ Officer Eiffel is back, Goddard hasn’t forgotten about them, and she finally for the first time feels _good._

It’s four days before she notices that in the cleanup, defrag, and reorganization, all the broken leftover pieces of Rhea in her system are gone.


End file.
